


Loss Ficlet: Negotiations

by missclairebelle



Series: Loss (In Chronological Order) [40]
Category: Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: F/M, Modern AU, Nesting, Pregnant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-18
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-12-21 14:33:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21076457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missclairebelle/pseuds/missclairebelle
Summary: Jamie and Claire start to nest, discuss some major life next steps, and cross a big milestone.





	Loss Ficlet: Negotiations

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written as part of the One Quote One Shot challenge over on Tumblr. My quote is bolded, along with the other canon lines in this installment. I hope you enjoy revisiting Loss Jamie and Claire as much as I do! <3

##  **Loss Ficlet   
****Negotiations  
****November 2019  
****(One Quote One Shot, Book 2)**

It’s funny, the things you can forget with the passage of time.

Things that are monumental, that change you and scar you. Things that somehow become the smeared residue of a time past before they disappear from memory entirely.

It’s funny how you can go on living as though they were never there.

I forgot the date one unseasonably warm Saturday morning in November. Jamie and I were embarking on an adventure of _normaling_ so banal that my excitement was off the charts. The thrum of our completely boring day registered at such a pitch that I failed to recognize it was the 2nd of November.

Without any prompting from me, Jamie had reached for the decaf coffee that morning. Save his tired hand scrubbing a lazy trail across his stubble-gritty face, he made no protest at the prospect of consuming the decaffeinated black sheep of the coffee family. I raised a curious brow at him as I set mugs on the counter before turning to core the last of the berries I’d frozen at summer’s end.

“For the peanut, ye ken,” he explained, setting the pot to brew.

“The peanut?” I asked, lifting a brow and biting my lower lip as I did my damnedest not to look at him. Out of my peripheral vision, I caught him adjusting his glasses (_a flash of what I had seen earlier in the week running through my mind – the ultrasound printout clipped to the pencil cup in his office as he took off his glasses to kiss me senseless_). It was like I knew what he was going to say, but I wanted to hear it anyway. 

Every bloody syllable of it.

He was easy and sexy like this, wearing impending fatherhood like a second skin. I hadn’t admitted it to him yet, but I’d started to think of him as “_hot dad_.”

“I think ye’ll find the ultrasound makes the bairn resemble something of _a peanut_. And I Googled. Ye shouldna have any more than two hundred milligrams of caffeine a day when ye’re pregnant. Doctor’s orders.”

“What doctor?” I imagined that at this point that my single raised eyebrow had migrated an incredulous path north of my hairline, like some cartoon character about to make an exclamation of _GADZOOKS_ or _ZOINK_.

Matter-of-factly, Jamie declared, “Dr. Google.”

As my heart threatened to burst with a pregnancy-induced hormonal surge of affection, we relocated from the kitchen to the back patio for one last weekend breakfast _al fresco_. Beneath a tartan blanket, we wordlessly contented ourselves with a late start to the day. We watched a damp-pawed Buffalo Bill bow to piles of leaves and growl wildly, circling them as though they contained some secret threat to his family’s well being. Blackberries bruised the tips of my fingers an almost-black purple and strawberries streaked a vibrant red slash of juice down Jamie’s favorite shirt. His curses gave way to a smile as I doubled over laughing, smearing peanut butter toast across the lapel of my robe.

With his fingers expertly working knots out of my feet, our plan for the afternoon wrote itself.

A stop for a costume to wear to Geillis’s murder mystery party (_an October 31st event that she refused to call a Halloween party because “I dinna bother with distasteful American holidays, Claire”_).

A lunch out (_Jamie’s treat to sate a post-midnight craving for too-greasy Chinese food that had attacked me so viciously three nights earlier that I had cried pressed against his chest as he laughed at me_).

A spin through the pet supply shop for a new bed for Buffalo Bill (_a reward for our first child’s bad behavior in tearing a sizable hole in the fabric and spreading cobweb-like stuffing from one end of our bedroom to the other_).

That evening, we were preparing the spare room for a Sunday spent painting the walls with an earthy green-gray low-VOC paint. As Jamie finished taping the woodwork above the closet doors, he asked an innocent question: “What’s yer plan with work once the peanut comes?”

Something about the question set me off, and I turned like some sort of primeval creature rising from horizon-licking flames with narrow, hot eyes. With my chin lifted, I asked, “What is _your_ plan with work? Quitting _your _job and staying home?”

Setting the tape down, he had the gall to appear entirely nonplussed by my inquiry as he began unscrewing the cover on the light switch. He had made a rather apparent choice to steer himself onto the high road. “Wouldna bother me, now that ye mention it. Freelancing and doing the stay-at-home da thing that is. It’s my surest plan to ensure that our bairn doesna have yer absolutely _wretched_ accent.”

The flick up of his eyes (_humor-filled, sparkling, and forgiving my snappiness_) made me feel as though an entire universe of fireworks were exploding behind my eyelids with each blink. It was enough that I was able to suppress the mild shudder at the idea of full-time surgical work with a a collicky baby (_a twenty-four-hour call assignment with aching, leaky breasts that required more attention in a day’s worth of hours than they had in my entire life up to that point_), and respond, “I intend to take a full maternity leave and return to work. Are you saying that you… _want_ to stay home?”

His noncommittal shrug spoke volumes. That was _precisely_ what he was saying with his rumpled, too-long hair and low-rise jeans.

“I made the applesauce in yer lunch from scratch this week. I used organic apples and lots of love. I’d be an okay househusband, Sassenach. I’m a braw chef, a dedicated neat freak, and make the bed up with an infantryman’s precision.”

Knitting my eyebrows together, I reached down to ruffle Buffalo Bill’s fur. “We’re still paying on that obscene California medical bill.”

There was a pause, a tightening in the room while the space between us seemed to swell. The mere reference to California, to the massive and entirely unexpected eighty-page invoice we’d received in the early summer’s mail, had sucked the oxygen from the room just as it’d sucked away a significant portion of our marital savings.

“I ken,” he responded, eyes darkening. “But I have a _plan_, _a nighean_.”

Part of me wanted to ask what it was, that plan. Instead, I took four steps across the room and kissed him, eyes open, in our baby’s future room. He opened his mouth as he slipped his hand into my hair, drawing me closer and grumbling as I pulled back. My voice was low, and I meant it, as I said, “Okay.”

I’d thought he was relaxed before, but something in him seemed to soften. It was a look I had seen on him before – the look of a deal made, a business maneuver well executed, a negotiation in which he had the upper hand. The bloody smug Scot had the self-satisfied smirk of a contented millionaire counting his stacks of money.

“You knew I’d say ‘yes,’ didn’t you?”

His eyes widened in mock exasperation as he shrugged, hands finding my buttocks and giving me a light squeeze. Like a gentlemen’s agreement sealed with a handshake, his forward embrace was the sealing of our deal. I smacked his bicep and yelped when he tightened his grip. “You know you own my ass, huh?”

“Of course I know that,” he chuckled, teeth finding my earlobe.

I was married to a future stay-at-home dad.

Later that evening, with a thoroughly taped nursery and sleep-heavy lids, I was raking curl cream through my shower-damp hair when he said it.

“Ye ken what today is?”

After a moment’s thought, I ventured a guess. “November second?”

It took another moment before it dawned on me.

“Oh.” It came out in a breath. I rose; Jamie shook his head. “Jamie…”

“One year.”

The argument we’d had the year before. It lived in an unadorned box under lock and key with some of the greatest regrets of my life. The way we’d treated one another, the way I’d said goodbye as he left. Standing, I recalled the sensation of John lifting me off of the kitchen floor, of the whipping rubber band snap when I realized that I was about to lose my husband.

It had been one year since the nightmare in California.

How I had put it out of my mind was a taunting mystery. Throughout the day, I had floated in a space suspended between thoughtlessness and intentional cruelty, it seemed.

“I almost lost ye, Claire. A year ago. Lost ye to my own stubbornness. Lost ye in the flesh. Lost the promise of _us_ that has itself written in my head until the end of the earth itself.”

His voice was not quite _unsure_, but it existed as a small thing in a body that bore scars mapping every moment in that desert, hospital, and pretty little bungalow.

“There isna a day that goes by where I dinna thank God for ye, for our life, and now for our bairn, but I canna shake the feeling that this is a dream. Bein’ here with ye, tryin’ to catalogue every change in yer body.”

“Jamie,” I croaked, pressing my hands against my stomach and feeling nothing more than a slight hardening. I had never wished more to grow. To have something tangible to show him that this was _real_.

“Ye think I’m mad, don’t ye? I ken it’s real. I ken I’m better, we’re better. That I have ye until we’re auld and gray, marrit.” Ever a chameleon, he softened, one corner of his mouth lifting into a half smile as he added, “Still horny.”

Sitting there on the edge of our bed, his words echoed those on that bloody voice memo he’d left me when he thought he would die, when he thought that I could be convinced to live our life for him with another man. The souvenir of his words roughly one year earlier were tucked in that same box of discarded memories. They rang in my head then, as plain as if he had again said them aloud (“_I promise ye this, Sassenach. Ye’ll be the most wonderful mother”_). Tears scalded the perimeter of my lower lash line.

I closed the distance between us, took his wrist. As if by reflex, **his hand rose slowly, floating like the leaves. **His fingers flattened against the hardened, non-rise of my lower stomach.

“I’m real, Jamie.”

He nodded, swallowed long and slow.

“_We’re_ real. We’re yours.”

A year of days existed between us and the argument that I had played over and over in my head. From that night I chose to sleep separate from him, from that morning when we’d parted with little more than a cold tilt of the head.

“I canna believe it’s been a year.”

At once, it had been an entire lifetime and no more than a blink, a single night’s dreamless sleep.

**“Claire. I need you,” he whispered** then**. “I need ye so.”**

It was our mulligan. The events of a year earlier did not count. We had another opportunity.

More time.

The space.

Enabled bodies.

A connection that had somehow been put into the fire, melted down, forged anew.

Stronger.

More undeniable.

Infinite.

It happened easily. The bunching of my nightgown in my hands, discarding it over his nightstand. The careful slip of his pajama pants down, the readying of his body and mine to join one another. His hand found my breast as I bent to kiss him, sinking my fingers into his hair. **Without the hampering** barrier of my nightgown, **it was easy.**

Making love to him was the ending we should have had a year ago. The goodbye that we should have had as he left me that morning – unified with a tenderness where words were unnecessary, useless, foreign things. Where we could speak to one another with a sigh or a look, a tilt of the head and a smile.

**I felt as though I were floating myself, rising without volition, drifting** my hands **up the length of his body, settling over him like a cloud on a hilltop, sheltering his need**.

It should have ended like this then – with reassurance and hope. By healing our fissures until we were no longer broken. And when he drew completion from me, muttering “_I love ye_” into my throat like a prayer, I knew that we had written a new ending for November 2nd.


End file.
